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FIRST MARRIAGE AND PARIS

1849-1858

“Je vais devenir quelqu’un. J’irai à Paris.”—Mme. Adam, Roman de mon Enfance.

It will be seen from the events recorded in the last chapter that Juliette at thirteen was both mentally and morally much more developed than a young English girl of eighteen or even twenty. Children in France, largely because they associate constantly with their elders instead of being relegated to the nursery, grow up more quickly than in England. A little French girl often is quite a little woman. She will go with her mother to pay calls, and at home help her mother to entertain visitors. The system in vogue in Juliette’s childhood of marrying girls at fifteen or sixteen naturally favoured their early development. The early marriage was the outcome of the mariage de convenance, which was more general in Juliette’s youth than now. When marriages were arranged by the family it was unnecessary to wait until the young people, the bride at any rate, was old enough to choose wisely for herself. Though it would not have been admitted that girls were married against their will, though their consent to the marriage was generally asked, not by the aspirant, usually, but by the girls’ parents, it was a mere matter of form, everything having been settled beforehand. Moreover, the girl in question, when appealed to in this perfunctory manner, was not encouraged to consult her heart. Indeed, that very uncertain and awkward factor is not supposed to intervene in what is known as the real French marriage. It is essentially a business affair, a matter of social position and of pounds, shillings and pence. We shall find, for instance, that in arranging a marriage for her granddaughter, Mme. Seron’s chief concern was that Juliette should have an establishment in Paris. This, in the first place, would give her an opportunity of displaying to full advantage her many gifts, and, secondly, would enable her fond grandmother to shine in metropolitan circles, for Mme. Seron hoped to make some arrangement whereby she could for a considerable part of the year reside with her granddaughter.

Juliette was not married until she was sixteen. But, as we have seen, no sooner had she entered her teens than her grandmother and father began—in divergent directions, of course—to make plans for her alliance.

It was about this time, that the parents of young X——, a youth of seventeen, proposed to Mme. Seron that in a few years he should marry Juliette. The following year brought a renewal of this proposal and also a second offer of marriage from another quarter. Dr. Lambert refused to listen to either of these requests for his daughter’s hand. His persistence in his idea of a working-class marriage for his daughter drove his mother-in-law into a frenzy and produced another drame de famille. Mme. Seron threatened her son-in-law with the gendarmes if he attempted to carry out his nefarious scheme. Dr. Lambert threatened to take Juliette abroad out of her grandmother’s reach. But in the end Mme. Seron conquered, and Dr. Lambert went off in a towering rage. For several months he ceased to visit Chauny.

Juliette, who had now grown into a handsome girl, had already attracted considerable attention at Chauny. Those who are privileged to know her now, in her declining years, can see how lovely she must have been in her youth. “She has had that singular good fortune ...,” writes one of her friends to-day, “to have been adorably beautiful (adorablement belle).”[26] The delicately moulded features, the animated expression, the satirical glance, the dignified bearing, the vivacious manner, which at eighty never fail to charm, must have indeed been dazzling in her far-off girlhood. In a word, Juliette Lambert was as gifted physically as mentally. No wonder that when, wearing a pretty blonde cap with pink roses, and escorted by her grandfather and an old friend, Blondeau, who lived in the same house, she made her first appearance at the Chauny theatre, there was quite a sensation, although when she returned her grandmother had to scold her for having marred her beauty by weeping over the play.

The quarrel between Mme. Seron and her son-in-law having died down, Juliette was permitted to spend the Christmas of 1850, and to stay on into the New Year, at Blérancourt.

It was during this visit that she made the acquaintance of the man who was to be her first husband. She was told one day that her father expected a friend to lunch, that the guest was an advanced republican and a Comtist to boot. This was the first time that Juliette had heard that name of Comte, which she was to learn to know only too well later. The guest came. He was a barrister (avocat) at the Paris Court of Appeal. But he lived at Soissons, where he was conducting a series of law-suits on behalf of an aunt. His name was Lamessine. He was of the south Italian type, with dark eyes, olive skin and shining black hair, for his grandfather had been a Sicilian who had settled in France and been naturalised during the Revolution. Dr. Lambert’s visitor was reputed a man of talent. His brilliant conversation pleased Juliette; but she detested the scepticism which led him to maintain that good is merely the necessary balance to evil, and that society must grow increasingly corrupt until it produces a new “vegetation.” Against such doctrines Juliette could not refrain from protesting. There was an animated discussion between the Sicilian, who believed in nothing, and his host’s idealist daughter, who was ready to believe in everything that was good. The guest departed with the words, “And I hope you bear me no grudge, Mademoiselle la Batailleuse.” “I only pray,” she replied, “that Heaven may reveal to you some knowledge, however slight, of the good and the beautiful.”[27]

In the spring, while Juliette was visiting her aunts, M. Lamessine came to Chivres. There, though he found La Batailleuse more charming than ever in her peasant’s costume, which by clever contrivances and adaptations she had learnt to make extremely becoming, he met with a cold welcome from the aunts and was not encouraged to return. In June, however, while Juliette was at Blérancourt, he came to see her again. Political affairs were moving towards Napoléon’s December coup d’état and the empire which Dr. Seron had so persistently prophesied. There was a mysterious meeting at Dr. Lambert’s. And the next day Juliette’s father said to her, “The crisis is grave; but we have with us a man in whose veins flows the blood of the carbonari. He will do something.” That man was M. Lamessine.

In December the barrister came to plead at Chauny. He presented a letter of introduction to Dr. and Mme. Seron. They, unlike the aunts, received him most cordially. Having been invited to dinner, he told Juliette that, influenced by her arguments he had become less sceptical. She did not believe him. She was vaguely conscious of some ulterior motive in his words. She felt ill at ease and left the salon early. On the morrow her grandmother announced that M. Lamessine had asked for her hand in marriage, that his treatment of the important matter of settlements was satisfactory, and that he was willing for Mme. Seron to spend every winter with her granddaughter and her husband when they should go to live in Paris.

But Juliette was not the kind of young person thus to be married out of hand and merely to please her grandmother. She was thunderstruck at such an announcement. She would not dream, she protested, of marrying a man who was twice her age. In vain did Mme. Seron plead that M. Lamessine was très bien, that his coming was providential, that resembling feature for feature one of the heroes of her favourite novelist Balzac, he could not fail to be the most suitable of husbands. “You must admit that I am right, Juliette,” she said, and forthwith she took down the volume in question and read the description. But even this striking likeness failed to reconcile her recalcitrant granddaughter to the match. Juliette appealed to her grandfather and to her old friend Blondeau, to save her from so uncongenial a mating, but to no purpose, for Mme. Seron had already won them over to her side. There was, however, one member of the family who would be less easy to convince. And Juliette, as was her custom, called in Blérancourt to redress the balance at Chauny. Dr. Lambert, knowing more about the proposed bridegroom than his mother-in-law, was horrified at the idea of his marrying his daughter. A few days later when he and his wife came over to Chauny, he was aghast to find how far things had gone. He would, he declared, never give his consent to the marriage.

Throughout the succeeding months there followed a long-drawn-out war of words, enlivened by perpetual drames de famille. At one time Juliette was forcibly carried off by her father to Blérancourt, then brought back to Chauny by her mother, who desired the match and kept her at Chauny out of her father’s influence. He, unhappy man, worn out by domestic grief and political disappointment, fell ill, and during his illness once again narrowly escaped arrest. Finally, his wife and mother-in-law broke down his resistance. By their importunity they had rendered his life unbearable. In a moment of passion he seems to have said: “Very well, do what you will,” then to have given his formal consent, without which they could do nothing, and to have signed the fatal document which sealed Juliette’s unhappiness. Almost immediately Dr. Lambert repented; but it was too late, and all he could do was to signify his disapproval by absenting himself from the wedding.

The unhappy subject of so much dissension had been reduced almost to welcome marriage even with so uncongenial a mate as M. Lamessine as one way of escape from perpetual family quarrels.

But alas! experience proved that Dr. Lambert’s objections to the union had been only too well founded. “The man whom they have chosen for your husband,” her father had written to her, “is not one whom you can ever love or who will ever love you.”

With a delicate hand and in a few poignant phrases Mme. Adam in her Souvenirs passes lightly over her married misery. Until after her daughter was born, in September 1854, she kept her sufferings to herself, dreading the anguish which a revelation of them would inflict on her loved ones. It was during her confinement at Blérancourt that Dr. Lambert discovered her unhappiness. Some months later, while she was visiting her granddaughter, it was borne in on Mme. Seron that she had committed the gravest of blunders in marrying Juliette against her will. Now that the last instalment of his wife’s dowry had been paid, M. Lamessine shamelessly avowed that he had never intended to keep his promise of receiving his wife’s grandmother as an inmate of his home every winter.

“You imagine Juliette happy,” he said. “She is not. Our misunderstandings are perpetual. If we had you as a third, what would they be like?”

“Is it true, Juliette, that you are unhappy?”

“Yes,” she replied, “as unhappy as it is possible to be.”

Mme. Seron rose. She leant against a piece of furniture to avoid falling, for she shook like a tree which has been uprooted.

She reminded her son-in-law of his promises. “They were only necessary,” he remarked cynically, “as long as you had not completely fulfilled yours.”

Mme. Seron left the house abruptly. Juliette never saw her again. She went home to Chauny to die. In eleven months she was followed by her husband, Dr. Seron, for, as he said, he could not live without “his dear scold” (sa chère grondeuse).

During the first three years of their married life the Lamessines resided at Soissons. But during that time they paid a visit to Paris; and Juliette had her first unforgettable impression of that brilliant city which had figured so large in the dreams of herself and her grandmother.

When Lamessine first proposed to her that she should wean her baby, Alice, and come with him to Paris, she trembled. For in Paris, she felt, her lot would be cast. Paris held her destiny. Her grandmother’s spirit seemed to dominate hers as soon as Paris entered into her life.

“Bah,” said her father, when she told him of her hesitation. “Don’t be afraid of it. Set foot in it bravely. Look it in the face, this Paris. One of two things will happen: either you will make your name there, as your poor grandmother desired, and then the trials of your unhappy marriage will not have been in vain; or you will break your bonds and come back to your father. With us you will lead a life, if not happy, at least free from those marital responsibilities which fill me with fear for your future.”[28]

The Paris which Juliette visited in 1855 was Paris of the early Second Empire, “still in the freshness of its hopes and enthusiasm.” It was Paris of the first universal exhibition, which was visited by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Paris at the close of the Crimean War.

This Paris fully came up to Juliette’s expectations. Never had she been so impressed save when as a little girl she had caught her first glimpse of the sea at Boulogne.[29]

“It is impossible,” she writes, “to imagine the complete amazement of a young provincial beholding Paris for the first time, overwhelmed by myriads of sights never dreamed of.” From that moment Juliette adored Paris with all the enthusiasm of her passionate soul. At a closer acquaintance, during a residence in the heart of Paris extending through several decades, it has never loosened its hold on her vivid imagination. We shall find her friend, Gambetta, in future years, speaking to her of votre Paris.

After a fortnight spent with her husband in an hotel on the Place Louvois, she still found herself, “uninitiated into the hundredth part of what she wanted to know.”[30] Herein lies the secret of the overpowering impression which Paris made upon her: “What she wanted to know!” Paris was to her the master-key to all knowledge. In Paris lived the great leaders of thought, with whose ideas her father had made her familiar, the idealist politicians, whose Utopian dreams she had made her own. In the streets of Paris had ebbed and flowed the tide of that wonderful revolution which had found an echo in Chauny streets, and even in Mlle. André’s pension. In Paris might be seen those exquisite masterpieces of Greek art, the living symbols of her divine Homer.

Nevertheless a shadow fell even over the radiant exultation of those first weeks in Paris. From infancy to old age Juliette Adam has always been ambitious. It was no mere obscure existence in the great city that she had pictured in her youthful dreams. Hers was to be no diary of a nobody. Encouraged by her grandmother, she longed for fame. But alas! her hopes were dashed when she found herself lost in the vast crowds which thronged the boulevards, when she regarded the miles of well-filled shelves in the immense halls of the Imperial Library. It seemed as if the only homage Paris would ever render her would be the admiring glances of street arabs, who distinguished her as they had done another Juliette. The young Mme. Lamessine despaired of ever emerging from the mass, of ever carving for herself even the tiniest niche in the temple of literary renown. For it was to be a distinguished writer that she aspired. Already she had quite a hoard of youthful scribblings, infantile verses which her grandparents thought wonderful, romances over whose patriotic incidents the youthful authoress had wept bitter tears, a prize essay, written in competition with the pupils of the boys’ school opposite her Chauny home.

During her life at Soissons, it was in study and in literary composition that Juliette had sought distraction from domestic unhappiness. Some of her verses, a poem entitled Myosotis, had actually been published and set to music by the cathedral organist.

But it was after her return from Paris that she achieved a success which encouraged her to hope that, perhaps, after all she might not pass her life unnoticed.

The popular novelist, Alphonse Karr, was then contributing to the Siècle weekly articles on social subjects, entitled “Buzzings” (Bourdonnements). A girl friend of Juliette’s, Pauline Barbereux, used to bring her the Siècle and together they read Karr’s articles. One of these was on the crinoline, then at the height of its vogue. After having thoroughly enjoyed himself at the expense of all its absurdities, Karr declared that there was not a single young and pretty woman in France with sufficient independence of mind not to wear it. “There is I,” cried Juliette. “And what if I wrote and told him so?” For though affecting the full skirt, pretty Mme. Lamessine had always stopped short of the crinoline. Pauline was delighted with the idea. So together they set to work to concoct the letter, which should, of course, be anonymous. The writer, therefore, was able to enlarge on the charms of this independent young female who refused to answer to the beck and call of fashion.

“Yes, sir,” wrote Juliette, “there is a pretty woman of twenty who does not wear the crinoline, who has never worn it, there is one in France, in the provinces, and that one is I, Juliette.”[31]

Mme. Adam, throughout her long life, has ever been a fervent feminist, passionately interested in woman’s rôle and position in society. In her childhood’s desultory reading she had eagerly devoured a volume on the Fronde. It interested her because women played the principal part in it. And she was thinking of those frondeuses when she led her schoolfellows round the playground behind the banner of the social democratic handkerchief.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that Juliette should insinuate into this, her first contribution to the press, her own views on feminism, though they were expressed as far as possible in the style of Alphonse Karr. To the accompaniment of little Alice’s baby gurglings, she read the rough draft to Pauline, who, having declared it superb, dictated it solemnly while Juliette copied it on to magnificent paper. Then the wonderful document, “the article,” as Pauline christened it, was re-read, folded carefully, put into an imposing envelope, signed with a beautiful seal, which was engraved with the writer’s Christian name. Thereupon, writes Juliette, we repaired (no word less ceremonious could express such an act) with our precious packet to the post.

Oh, that week, how interminable it seemed! Could it be possible that Alphonse Karr would reply to the letter? On the night before the Siècle’s appearance Juliette dreamed of her poem, Myosotis. She interpreted that dream as a good sign. The 20th of February, 1856, dawned. Would Paris read that letter signed Juliette?... Pauline comes in breathless, pale with excitement. The Siècle flutters in her hand. “Juliette,” she cries, “it is all there.” “All.” “And then,” writes Juliette,[32] “we take two chairs and we draw them close to one another. We unfold the paper, and each holding one corner, we read. Yes, the whole of my letter is there. I read it. Pauline reads it. Not a word has been changed. I burst into tears. Pauline weeps too. Baby Alice, playing on the carpet, when she sees us crying, begins to howl. Her godmother, Pauline, soothes and consoles her. I think of my grandmother ... and I cry: ‘Grandmother, I shall be a writer.’

“I send father my article and tell him how I came to write it.”

This somewhat severe critic replied at length, and for the first time, it appeared, discerned in his daughter a promise of literary talent.

For the rest of her time at Soissons Juliette read voraciously, desiring to prepare herself for Paris. Whirled suddenly into the great vortex of metropolitan life, as she expected to be, she could not hope to have any time for study. She must, therefore, work hard to fill up the gaps in her desultory education and to equip herself for the brilliant career awaiting her.

Finally her hopes were realised. She found herself the mistress of a flat in Paris in the Rue de Rivoli, with a balcony looking on to the Louvre and close to the Museum of Antiquities, the temple of her gods. Her grandmother’s faith in her seemed to be justified.

But alas! as the weeks went on, Juliette herself suffered disappointment. The society in which she moved was utterly uncongenial. Her husband’s friends bored and revolted her; they talked of nothing but business; and her husband himself, when not discussing affairs, was for ever extolling the doctrines of Auguste Comte, whose positivism seemed to Juliette the negation of all her idealism. This disappointment, and the unhappiness of her home life, brought on an attack of neuralgia. She consulted the doctor of her quartier, a certain Dr. Bonnard, who had already corresponded with her father about a medical pamphlet, of which Dr. Lambert was the author. The doctor was quick to see that what Juliette needed was the physic of congenial society. He himself fortunately was in touch with literary people. He introduced her to two circles, one poetical, the other philosophical, where his young patient speedily felt herself at home. It was through Dr. Bonnard that the charming young Mme. Lamessine became a member of L’Union des Poètes. And it was a member of the Union, who, on a certain memorable day, took Juliette to see her first great Paris celebrity. This was the aged Béranger, a poet, whose name had been one of the household words of her childhood, whose songs exalting his adored Emperor her grandfather had known by heart.

Never had Juliette seen “a simpler, more charming, more paternal, more kindly satirical old man.”[33] The poet had read some of his young visitor’s compositions. And the verdict he passed on them was frank and somewhat brutal.

“My child,” he said, “you will never be a poet, but you may one day be a writer.”

Juliette’s reception of this crushing dictum, while showing her sensitiveness to criticism, proves that her reason had not been warped by all the extravagant adulation she had received in childhood. For she bore the veteran poet no grudge for his disappointment of her hopes. But, from that day, she ceased to write poetry and withdrew from the Poet’s Union.

As she was leaving, Béranger said to her, “Good-bye, my child. You will soon forgive me.”

“Good-bye?” said Juliette, “why not au revoir? Don’t you like me? Don’t you wish ever to see me again?”

Shrugging his shoulders and looking through the open windows, he said, “I think that I shall soon be going up there to see the Dieu des bonnes gens.” He died shortly afterwards at the age of seven-and-seventy, in July 1857.

Before her reluctant resignation from the Poet’s Union Juliette had begun to frequent a philosophical circle to which Dr. Bonnard introduced her. We have seen how from her tenderest childhood her father had made her acquainted with most of the numerous philosophical systems—the ideas of Cousin, Fourier, Comte, Proudhon, and others—which were at that time revolutionising human thought. With her natural quickness and keenness of intuition Juliette had comprehended their main principles. Consequently she was not the least confused by the learned discussions which took place in the salon of her new friends, M. and Mme. Fauvety.

M. Charles Fauvety was founder and editor of a well-known publication, La Revue Philosophique. Among the chief contributors to this erudite magazine was the philosopher, M. Charles Renouvier, the author of a learned work, Essais de Critique Générale, in four volumes, which he was then preparing, and which was not completed until 1864.

M. Renouvier possessed that inestimable gift of lucid exposition, which is so essentially French. Listening to, engaging in, and noting down his conversations with his editor, Juliette continued and carried to a point far advanced for one of her age and sex that philosophical education which her father had begun. It had long been her habit to keep a diary and to insert in it accounts of any discussion which interested her. And it is to this habit that we owe the reproduction in her Souvenirs of those entrancing conversations which give us so vivid a picture of the intellectual life of the period.

Throughout Juliette’s early womanhood and maturity there was no one who exercised a greater influence on French thought than Hippolyte Taine. His influence was at its zenith in the sixties; but already in this year, 1857, those who like Fauvety and Renouvier were gifted with prophetic insight could discern his coming greatness.

The publication of Taine’s Essais de Critique et d’Histoire was a great event in the circle of La Revue Philosophique.

“These young men[34] are admirable,” cried Renouvier.[35] “And seldom has it been given to forerunners, such as I, to take so great a delight in their disciples. For I, in a way, hatched Taine.”

“Taine,” said the editor of La Revue Philosophique, “will remain the hope or the anxiety of every philosophical system. He has taken a scourge in his hands. For the next half-century, he will enthrone himself on the judgment seat, and he will scathe every idea which wears out with use. I, as a philosopher, fear him and rely upon him alone.”

Mme. Lamessine was not the only woman member of that erudite circle. There was Mme. Fauvety, a clever woman, who had been an actress, and for a time the rival of Rachel. She mingled intelligently in the philosophical discussions of her husband and his friends. There was also a certain Mme. Jenny d’Héricourt, the only member of the circle whom Juliette disliked. She too contributed to La Revue Philosophique; and she was tainted with that narrow bigotry and dogmatism which were characteristic of the publication, but from which the broad-minded Renouvier was entirely free. A blue-stocking of the most objectionable type, une vertu farouche, as Juliette called her, la forte Jenny was conceited, censorious, pedantic and an inveterate scandalmonger. Such a person would naturally refuse to believe that any one so young and pretty as Juliette could have the slightest comprehension of philosophy. Nevertheless, on one subject at least the feminine Juliette and the Amazonian Jenny were agreed: they both detested Proudhon. Jenny had attacked his doctrines in an extremely able book, which Juliette had read and appreciated; for the materialistic and purely economic ideas of the father of modern syndicalism had never appealed to her, and she had fought many a battle of words on that subject with Dr. Lambert, who admired him. But, when Juliette ventured to discuss the economist with his female critic, Mme. d’Héricourt was furious. “Would you believe it,” she exclaimed to Fauvety, “that young lady actually dares to take upon herself to underline Proudhon!” It was bold, doubtless, in one so young and so charming. But Mme. Lamessine, nothing daunted by Jenny’s gibes, was to be bolder still, as we shall see in the next chapter.

We should convey a very wrong impression of Juliette’s early womanhood if we represented her as entirely absorbed in abstruse studies and frequenting only philosophers and blue-stockings. The lighter sides of life have always appealed to her. As a schoolgirl she excelled in games, and she has ever loved play as well as work. Now she was eagerly grasping the opportunities of amusement which Paris of the Empire knew so well how to offer, especially to one as attractive as Mme. Lamessine.

Mme. Fauvety took her to the theatre—not to first nights, this wise ex-actress preferred to wait until the players had perfected their parts, and it was not until the last performances were announced that she considered a play really worth seeing. Alexandre Dumas fils was then at the height of his popularity. La Dame aux Camélias, Diane de Lys, La Question d’Argent, were the talk of the town. Though Juliette had ceased to write poetry, she had not ceased to associate with poets. And it was a member of the Poet’s Union who took her to her first fancy-dress ball, where her escort appeared as Vercingetorix, and she herself was disguised as the Gallic Cassandra, Vellèda. She wore a long white robe, confined by a golden girdle from which hung a gilded scythe. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and it was for the first time in her life, she writes, “for even at dances in those days we wore sleeves.” Her light brown hair with its gleam of gold hung over her shoulders, crowned with a wreath of mistletoe. Meyerbeer, the musical idol of the early Empire, happened to be present. Vellèda made a great impression on this queer little old man. “Why! she will make me forget my Selika!” (the composition on which he was then engaged), he is said to have exclaimed. “I am too old to fall in love with a new face,” and he left the ball-room abruptly. For months afterwards every morning Juliette received a bunch of violets with the words, Souvenir ému à Vellèda—and one day came a ticket for a box for the first night of the Pardon de Ploërmel. But she never saw her aged admirer again. Some years after his death, on the occasion of the first performance of his L’Africaine, Juliette received a ticket for a box in a little casket with a bunch of violets, tied with a ribbon on which was written le dernier. “She will come to the first night of L’Africaine wherever she is,” Meyerbeer had said.

Already the Lamessines were in the whirl of political life. On the 14th of January, 1858, the evening of Orsini’s attempted assassination of the Emperor, while they were shopping in the Palais Royal, a Sicilian friend, who was with them, was arrested. On the next morning their flat was searched. But this time there were no compromising documents for Juliette to conceal. M. Lamessine had no difficulty in proving his friend’s innocence and obtaining his speedy release.

Those were the days when the long conflict between sermentistes and abstentionistes, which later was to rage high in Juliette’s salon, was just beginning. The sermentistes were those who consented to take the oath of allegiance to the Empire, the abstentionistes those who held themselves completely aloof.

Juliette and her friends at Mme. Fauvety’s were all ardent abstentionistes. They were disgusted when, in June 1857, the first so-called republican, Émile Ollivier, took the oath, on his election to the Corps Legislatif. Ollivier’s betrayal of the republican cause, they regarded as all the more inexcusable because his father, one of the stalwarts of 1848, was then in exile through his loyalty to the principles his son had sacrificed. But Ollivier and many others, who speedily followed his example, had on their side no less a democrat than Proudhon. That unflinching advocate of the people’s cause maintained that to take the oath to the Emperor was merely to recognise the people’s sovereignty embodied in the chief of the State. Such an argument did not raise Proudhon in the esteem of so uncompromising a person as Juliette.